Get to these NYC art installations (and these neighborhoods) while they're hot.

Art lovers have plenty to see in New York City, from the recently-reopened Whitney Museum to the cool galleries in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. But while the weather's nice, check out these outdoor installations that were practically built just for your Instagram account. These works aren't just pretty, though—they each spotlight emerging (or re-emerging) sections of New York.

Meridian (Gold)

Brooklyn-based artist Mika Tajima’s installation on Long Island City’s Hunter’s Point South Park, on the Queens waterfront just across from midtown Manhattan, is fleeting in every way: the temporary public arts project, a boxy, wood and resin structure, emits a plume of illuminated water vapor whose colors shift spectrally between magenta and pale cyan. The twist? The change in color corresponds to the real-time fluctuation of the global price of gold. Bordered by a bench-like seat that’s meant to evoke a communal spa, the project challenges viewers to ponder both the fickle nature of social perception and our obsession with material goods.

Commissioned by SculptureCenter as part of Public Process, a program that teaches high school students about public art, the installation sits on a stretch of waterfront that was once a post-industrial wasteland, proving that with a little TLC, some of the city’s most hopeless locales can be spiffed up and reimagined. Take a break from contemplating “the fleeting materiality of contemporary life” at LIC Landing, an outdoor event space with a café, next door to a central green, a playground, and a dog run.

June 9-September 25.

Cabin

Governors Island, that ever-mysterious sliver of land just off the southern tip of Manhattan, is getting a new look courtesy of British artist Rachel Whiteread’s outdoor work Cabin. Take the ferry from Manhattan's Battery Maritime Building or Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park over to the new site-specific installation on Discovery Hill, and you’ll come upon the quaint-looking shed. Take a closer look, though, and you’ll notice that the structure is made of solid concrete—a winking response to the island’s 10 new acres of manmade topography, made from a mammoth 297,000 cubic yards of fill. The reverse plaster-cast cabin creates a sense of drama as a humble gesture set against the massive New York City skyline.

The island, which has served as a military base for both the US Army and the Coast Guard, was closed to the public for much of its history. But recent revitalization efforts, spearheaded by Dutch architecture firm West 8, have rendered the once-spooky spate of land not just usable, but user-friendly. The Hills round out the island’s 30-acre public park, opened in 2014, and offers real estate to huge, sloping slides, picnic-perfect grassy knolls, and killer views of downtown Manhattan and Lady Liberty that’ll make any lazy summer weekend feel accomplished.

Rockaway!

If there were a way to rub the Rockaways' rebound in the face of Hurricane Sandy, Katharina Grosse’s brazen installation on Fort Tilden, a quiet beach just off Rockaway peninsula, might fit the bill. This colorful project presents a total transformation of a U.S. Army Coast Artillery Post’s abandoned aquatics center. Grosse spray-painted the decrepit building and the surrounding grounds in near-blinding waves of hot pink, red, white, and orange to reflect the area’s sunsets. It’s a proud, if temporary, final hurrah for the building, which was declared structurally unsound following the storm and is set to be demolished in late 2016.

We’ve seen Gross’s vivid artistic antics before. Her Amtrak piece, part of a seven-mural series called psycholustro, included spray paint-covered structures all along the rails of the Northeast Corridor, in an effort to take passengers’ attention away from their phones, and on to the journey. Well, she’s certainly gotten ours.